India, Oct. 19 -- India has deeply disappointed some of my Indian intellectual friends in America, as well as the western media, by failing to produce the revolution they had been predicting. When I posted on X about the October 10 protests, saying that everything seemed normal apart from the traffic jams, they attacked me; when the Tiranga protest on October 16 failed to deliver the promised uprising, they merely redoubled their opinions. Apparently, their predictions require less scrutiny than my factual description of what I see.

There's a large gap between the India I am visiting and the India that I read about in America. I have been here for nearly three weeks, mostly staying at IIT Delhi and IIT Kharagpur, spending time with stude...